If everything goes as planned tomorrow, I’ll be up and out of bed early, and on the road with my shovel.

I’m going out to help plant a few trees in the local state park. Our community asks for volunteers to plant trees, pick up trash at the shore and in streams, and help with other community events. It has me thinking a bit of how we try to build community online.

The Cre8asite Forums started out a few years back as a Yahoo Club. It was a companion site to a Yahoo community that focused upon small business. Many of the members of the Small Business Club were work-at-home folks, either moonlighting, or just newly self-employed. We were there together to talk about working with customers, paying taxes, advertising, learning about business licensing, and other aspects of going it alone. Except we weren’t alone. We had each other.

The Cre8pc Yahoo Club looked at problems that faced businesses online, such as promoting to search engines and directories, buying and selling domain names, writing copy for a site, making pages usable. We gave each other tips on building pages, and worked together.

A few years later, the Cre8asite Forums was created when Yahoo became too much to deal with anymore. Between outages of service, advertisments, and unexplained changes, we had to move. We were fortunate that some club members were skilled at programming and putting a forum online. We’ve been very fortunate in the way people have joined in to help each other at the forums.

With the Cre8asite Resource Library, and our Cre8tive Flow blog, we’re still attempting to build community. The Resource Library is a way to help people point to pages that answer specific questions. It’s our own annotation of the web. It is possible for people to sign up and add pages that they think can help others. People can also leave comments about pages they find. If you read an article that you located through the Library, why not leave a comment about it?

With the Cre8tive Flow Blog, we are hoping that we can point out some interesting stuff happening at the forums, and the Library, or on the web in general. As a blog, it has its own unique way of adding to conversations on the web. We’ve enabled comments for people to respond to posts, and add their own unique perspectives. We also set up trackback so that we can leave messages on other blogs to let them know that we’ve written about a post elsewhere on the web. We are also pinging some of the blog directories and services out there to let people know that we are here.

We are also using RSS feeds from the Forum and the Blog. If you’d like to display a feed from the forum or blog (or anywhere), or just use a news aggregator to read them, and you’re having difficulties, let us know, and we’ll lend a hand.

One of the best parts about being an Administrator at Cre8asite Forums was one of the best parts about being a moderator at the old Yahoo Club. That was when you were able to answer someone’s questions, and help them, and then watch as they turned around and helped someone else.

As I’m digging up the earth tomorrow, and planting trees along side my neighbors, I’ll probably also be thinking about ways in which I can help this online community grow. If you have any ideas or suggestions, or would like to help a little with the digging, please, let me know.